Feature Requests

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Valerie - It likely possible to replace all of the individual emails you have that are specific to a property with a single version, and then use the custom fields. I think it would be a lot easier to manage that way, because if you want to add something that applies to all units then you would add it in one place rather than in your email for DP, CMR, BB, etc. I guess I'm just restating my prior post suggestions, which is that custom fields are the way to go to avoid duplication.

But maybe the OR guys will have a way to do what you're asking...

Thanks for the suggestions about adding custom fields.

But back to the original topic...the screen shot below illustrates why I made this suggestion. If we were able to link email templates to particular properties then when sending an email from a booking instead of seeing a long list of templates (like in the screen shot) the system could only show those templates linked to that property.

https://snipboard.io/Kq2DNE.jpg

Thanks, Lydia!

Yep! The confirming reservation, followup, etc. actions are things we're starting to think about. Our current idea is to establish a booking status and show by color on the ribbon so it's easy to see if it needs items to confirm, payment is overdue, etc. No ETA yet, but we're working on the planning.

If you have a custom field that's only used on some properties for trash instructions or other special case things, that's fine too -- leave the other properties blank and it'll render as a blank in the email. Just make sure the surrounding design of the email is fine with having a blank there or content and you'll be good to go.

Yep, that makes a lot of sense -- making the availability display for sharing a built in feature instead of having to manually set up widgets and juggle URL's.

We've got plans for a housekeeping/staff module upcoming next year (yeah, I know we were talking about it this year, but the Airbnb API preempted that). With that it'll get at a lot of those detailed reports and displays for staff and cleaners.

Will keep this in mind as we get closer in the planning process!

Hi Valerie,

I don't really know why I responded with those facebook groups. Very sorry, I can only imagine that I was trying to respond to someone else's post and got confused.

If you scroll down the page when you are reading forum posts here you'll see other forums, the appropriate one for a feature request is called (drum roll) feature requests ;-)

Sorry about the confusion!

Is this something where you could create a template the check in for all properties, but offers the specific reminder for those properties where trash needs to be put out? Just an idea. I think some of property management gets creative because we have many different ways to accomplish a similar task. I like the way you are thinking about this.

Valerie - there are no links to those places you mention because they are groups on Facebook. Seems like this Forum is the best place if you have questions for OR programmers/staff. Only other place you can go for general advice from other OR users (not from OR employees) is a Facebook page called "Unofficial OwnerRez Support Group." That page is NOT managed by OR.

Hi Rich,

I typically set a reminder for the items below. I've created custom email templates and set a trigger so that these reminders are automatically sent to me at the desired times.

CONFIRM REZ ITEMS (used to check the booking 21 days before arrival to make sure we have everything needed before sending the Check-in packet: paid in full, signed rental agreement, copy of ID)

FOLLOW UP: reminder to refund security deposit (if applicable) and send a follow up letter depending on which site the booking came from)

PAYMENT IS DUE: reminder for me to be aware of a payment that is due in case I need to trigger the payment or to check to be sure it is scheduled to be sent automatically

PAYMENT IS DUE (FINAL): reminder for a booking that has more than two payments; this one is for the final payment. (I had to create this reminder in OR because the system would not let me use the "PAYMENT IS DUE" template on the same booking twice. It presented an error that said the template was already in use.

Hi Rich,

I was thinking today of sending a few feature requests for OR to consider when I remembered this earlier suggestion you sent. Re-reading it, it seems you are asking me to go to "Say No to VRBO Service Fee" and "Short Term Rental University" to submit feature requests for OR. Is this correct? Where can I find these forums? I don't see a link here in OR, only "Feedback" which is why I thought this was the place for such suggestions.

Thanks Rich, for the suggestions. I also love the custom fields for the bookings. But this won't help me much in the situation I am describing.

For instance, I have 2 properties that I might need to send an email to a guest to remind them to put out the trash for pick up. I'd rather send them a reminder email than include the information in the Guest Instructions, because it is my experience that guests don't read those instructions unless they are looking for some piece of information in particular (like the address of the property or the wifi information). Plus this would not apply to EVERY guest, just the ones who might be staying during dates that include a trash pick up day.

This is why I made the suggestion originally.

One more thing occurred to me, maybe there could be two flavors of this new field, one being just the link and the other being a screenshot image of the calendar along with the link, and some words about checking the link for latest updates.

People love a graphical view, this would be an awesome addition to OR!

I’d put it in every template email that’s sent to non guests, such as

Me
My wife
Coowner sister in law
Cleaner
Daughters

Each of the non guests have an interest in knowing how many bookings there are. My daughters for example are keenly interested in knowing when one of our units remain unbooked as a weekend approaches.

Sister in law gets a standard email at every new nook in in her co owned unit.

My experience is that few people use bookmarks on their cell phones. Heck, even I have none. So the next best thing is that I give them, and myself, a link in a lot of emails. So all they need to do is search on their phone for a recent email from me and they can see the ribbon calendar.

Obviously there is a workaround, just creat an account custom field. But to me this is an obvious good thing to have for all the reasons I’ve given.

So what is the business purpose you'd intend to use this for? Just trying to understand your goal.

I don’t have a website. This is just a suggestion that would make it easier for all users to access the OR hosted ribbon.

I didn’t even know it existed until recently, and even when I did it took me two minutes to find it.

I suspect many users of templates along with the insert fields have periodically scrolled thru the list of all insertable fields just looking for interesting ones, and this one would be very interesting. Even to users with a website.

Can you provide more specific examples of exactly how you're trying to use this? You can send guests to the URL for your website if you have one, that way they can see all your properties if you have more than one.

I frequently like to include a link to the OR-hosted ribbon for each property. Would be nice if there was a custom field so that I could insert it automatically. Obviously I could create a custom field and just use that, but seems like most users would appreciate the convenience of having it in the insertable fields lists.

Unfortunately not. Hopefully next year sometime.

Chris,

Any update on the text messaging feature?

Scott

Please please please. This feature is a must have. In my area, beach house weeks are multiple thousands. Guests don't want to front such a large amount a t deposit, and I don't want to leave a large amount to the final payment. I need at least three payments.

Hopefully this is a simple addition, now that I'm using the Rate Calendar for 100% of my rate & min night settings, I could save a mouse click if there was a link directly in the Rate Calendar page.

And for anyone not familiar with where to go next after changing rates/min nights it will be a nice way to guide them to the correct place to push rates. The first few times I used it I had to poke around until I found the place.

Will do. For public closure, though, it seems that the photos did properly deploy to both Airbnb and HomeAway, so the error in the Listing Quality Analyzer may be ignorable? I'll open a support ticket to follow up.

I **really** wish that I could permanently set the filters on the ribbon to reflect bookings which a) have an unsigned rental agreement and b) are not paid in full.

I'd gladly give up a little vertical space if the screen could highlight the ribbon settings, but I don't think I'd ever need to change it again. At a glance I always would like to know this information...

Seems like a tiny "sticky' checkbox next to each filter option would be workable...

(edit)
I spent some more time thinking about this, here are some more details ....

==> the filter settings I'd probably use would be 'rental agreement signed==YES' and 'payment status == PAID IN FULL'

with these settings, any booking in the ribbon would be shaded/transparent if either of the filters (or both) are not true.

Now the next step would be to figure out why a booking is shaded....

not-paid-in-full: Currently when hovering over a booking I can see unpaid amounts, which is nice, but would be better if the unpaid amount was highlighted in red. Otherwise takes two mouse clicks, one to open the booking, then a 2nd to reach transactions where the guest balance is highlighted in red.

rental-agreement-unsigned: Currently the only way to see this is two mouse clicks, one to open the booking and then a second to reach legal. But on that page there isn't any obvious way to know the agreement isn't signed because the screen is blank. The absence of an agreement is my only clue

SUMMARY - sticky filter settings is nice because it at least gives an alert that something is wrong. Figuring out what is somewhat difficult. Obviously as I'm writing this my brain knows exactly what to do, but over time we all forget little things that require thinking like this, and very specific navigational paths used only once a month are easily forgotten. The real solution I'm looking for is an easy way to never overlook either unpaid payments or unsigned rental agreements. I currently have emails sent to myself for unsigned RAs but it's kind of awkward because I can't build a trigger that looks every day at these things and keeps sending an email. I needed multiple triggers and had to choose specific points in time... Overall I think just about every OR user has the same desire to have an easy way to not overlook these things, with the minimum amount of work/mouse clicks.

(edit2)
I just looked at my triggers for checking for unsigned RAs and I have 3 which are set 10 days, 2 days and 1 day before arrival date. These are just a safety net in case I've every completely lost track of an unsigned RA. Obviously I want to get the RA signed close to booking-created, but I don't want even more triggers.... And if I want to add more triggers for unpaid status, I end up with an even larger number of triggers... Surely there is an easier way to tackle this that would be more accessible to all OR users !!

This would be better handled as a support ticket, as there should not be this problem. Can you send it in that way please?

I'll add that this is especially important because VRBO does such a bad job of this itself. When looking at their Inbox it's impossible at a glance to tell the difference between new bookings and other activity like messages or payments. When there is a lot of activity going on, like this time of year, it's incredibly easy to get confused by recent activity from someone who booked months ago versus brand new bookings.

And since I now have to manually issue payment requests for uncollected taxes (in CO) it's very important that I realize when I have a new booking.

It's interesting that until recently there wasn't really anything I needed to do, OR has automated my operations so well that me knowing when I got a new booking was just for my awareness!

After using channel bridge for importing bookings there is a report summarizing what happened, but it's impossible to tell which are completely new bookings versus bookings which had an additional payment made.

For instance in my import today I see 5 rows showing status==Updated but only two of them are new bookings.

I always know if I have one, two or more new bookings and it would be nice to have positive confirmation that what I'm expecting (ie: two new bookings) are recognized that way by OR, and then I would be able to also focus on what changed for the non-new bookings, such as additional payments.

Yes, that'd be a "Competitive Price Analyzer" widget. We've got that on the To-Do list. Don't have an ETA for it though, sorry!

I just spent hours uploading and captioning and sorting all the new photos from my photographer for my new listing. I ran the listing quality analyzer and see that almost all of the photos are too big. (I'm API-integrated; they seem to show fine on Airbnb, but my HomeAway listing hasn't yet deployed the updated photos, so I can't check there yet.)

I just don't have it in me tonight to spend hours resizing everything in GIMP and re-uploading and re-captioning and re-sorting them. :)

Is there a feature on the roadmap to automatically resize images to match each integrated channel's maximum size? It would be quite nice, since most photos provided by photographers these days are grossly huge thanks to the impressive megapixel counts of today's cameras...

7BlackDuck - the OR team is super responsive, but this forum isn't exactly the correct place for feature requests. They have a separate forum for that. Of course, sometimes good ideas come up in this forum, so it's not a rule or anything, just pointing out that the feature request forum exists and putting specific ideas like this one makes it easier for them to not overlook anything.

That said, the OR team, just like any software team, has a backlog of probably 1,000 great ideas that they are constantly evaluating before they start on making any updates. Just because an idea is a good one doesn't mean it will get worked on anytime soon.

For sure they monitor these forums - in fact I've gotten emails from Chris yesterday and today about a possible bug I reported yesterday (a weekend) and they made a release of a new code version yesterday (Saturday). So you can be confident they are seeing anything that gets posted!